Stem cells

Laboratory dramas

Four books reflect on the most operatic field in science

WHY does embryonic stem-cell research cause such dramas? These books propose two perspectives. Three journalists—Eve Herold, Seth Shulman and Cynthia Fox—each suggest that this is a new topic that has been hijacked by a small group of political hotheads in America. By contrast, Hannah Landecker, an anthropologist at Rice University, Texas, charts 60 years of tissue-culture science. Over this period cells gradually came to live free from bodies, then experiments conjured them bit by bit into freezable, mass-produced objects and eventually into chimeras with parts from more than one species. Together, the two perspectives explain why all things stem cell slap the layman in the face, and why his shock bewilders many a scientist.

Embryonic stem cells clump together as a tiny and distinct blob inside fluid-filled balls called blastocysts. That is what embryos look like when they are between five and seven days old. To conduct experiments on embryonic stem cells, scientists extract the clump from its blastocyst (destroying the rest of the embryo in the process), and then keep the stem cells separately in Petri dishes. Doing so maintains each stem cell's potential to develop into any type of cell in the human body by removing it from the chemical signals of other cells that would otherwise prompt specialisation. Alone in their Petri dishes, embryonic stem cells are primed for anything, making them unique tools for research and therapy. They divide and divide, forming populations of identical copies of themselves known as lines.

It is the blastocyst destruction in this process that ideologues perceive as morally reprehensible. By equating it to killing babies they entangle the science in the politics of abortion. Ms Herold argues strongly against such views. Her book points out that giving individual rights to a blastocyst is problematic. At that early stage, embryos can split to form twins or triplets. Or pairs of blastocysts can fuse and develop into a normal baby, who grows into a healthy adult.

Ms Herold also points out a number of inconsistencies. Federal funding of stem-cell research has been withdrawn as a result of pressure by people—a minority among taxpayers—who take a moral stand against it. Yet people who disapprove of using animals to conduct medical research still contribute to it through the federal taxes they pay. And why does destroying blastocysts in the name of finding cures evoke such tigerish protests when most fertility clinics have for years routinely disposed of them as medical waste?

Using arguments similar to those made by Chris Mooney in “The Republican War on Science”, Mr Shulman, by contrast, considers the political misrepresentations of stem-cell science. Just over six months into his presidency, Mr Bush declared on television that he would end federal funding of most stem-cell research. It was his first national television address. Publicly funded work could continue on 60-or-so genetically diverse stem-cell lines, Mr Bush said. But the presidential lines, as they came to be known, numbered about two dozen, not 60, and the immediate effect of the decision left 11,000 frozen American embryos that had been donated for research hanging, quite literally, in liquid nitrogen.

Researchers cherish lines of embryonic stem cells. They think delicate chemical husbandry will one day yield a method to grow the cells into replacements for dead and diseased tissue. A human egg, with its nucleus swapped for that of a patient's skin cell, can behave as if it has just been fertilised by a sperm and grow into a blastocyst. The clump of stem cells in the middle of a blastocyst clone could then be coaxed into nerve cells for a patient with Parkinson's disease, or cardiac muscle for a heart-disease patient, without risk of rejection by those patients' immune systems.

Ms Fox's book captures the adventures of scientists working towards this medical ambition with a realistic humanity. Hers is less workmanlike than the other books and refreshingly unideological. She tells of Egyptian scientists trying to establish a research centre in the midst of suicide-bombings. She describes underground stem-cell clinics in China and a Japanese doctor using the cells to give skinny women bigger bosoms. Away from the polarised propaganda, these are the many ambitions that stem-cell research is stirring up.

In the final chapters of their books Ms Fox and Ms Herold chart the undoing of Hwang Woo-suk, once the global leader in the field, who lied about creating human embryonic stem cells by cloning. Ms Fox's examination of “Hwang-gate” is the more colourful. Mr Hwang's comments encouraged South Korean kindergartens to swap wooden chopsticks for metal ones. The metal variety have more slippery pincers to work with and so provide apparently better training for the stem-cell technicians of the future. The officially titled “Supreme Scientist” also kept more than 60 bank accounts under different names and carried bags of cash between banks to obscure paper trails for his funding.

Mr Hwang's fakery damaged the integrity of a science that could ill afford any bad news. Meanwhile, doctrinal activists still sing out their contradictions and exaggerations. Britain, so far one of the least hysterical countries, recently postponed a decision about whether making chimeric cells out of rabbit-egg cytoplasms and human nuclei should be illegal. Tabloid newspapers immediately began commissioning cartoons of Frankenbunnies.

Yet few laymen realise that scientists first fused cells from different species as far back as the 1960s, as Ms Landecker describes. In those instances nuclei as well as cytoplasms came together and the hybrid cells made perfectly functioning enzymes that expressed the genetic code of two types of animal. That is much closer to what Mary Shelley imagined than anything British stem-cell researchers are proposing today. The level-headedness that can be gained from historical perspective is the value in reading Ms Landecker's account. Unfortunately, though, the signs are that this search for new medicines is becoming ever more operatic.